This is what a cloudy day (later turned into some kind of rainstorm) inspired me (Fabio Severo) and Alessandro Imbriaco as our contribution to photographers @600, the online group show promoted by photolovers group mus-mus, showcaswing each single image made by 100 different photographers all over the world on November 4, 2008 (not a day like any other, isn't it?) at internet time 600 beats (which for us was around 14:3o local time). Praise to the mus-mus clan and their great effort in putting all these together, see what a wonderful list of photographers they gathered!

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out"

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

This is the opening of Bert Danckaert's last book, Simple Present - Beijing, urban fragments of the "unremarkable, undistinguished" spaces that compose the whole we are used to think and see as Beijing. We never see any kind of human presence, as we never see any trace of the sky in those scenes, we almost never understand the purpose of the objects and the places depicted by Danckaert, like leads towards the solving of an impossible riddle.

Make Sense! was the title of Danckaert's first book, which was the first chapter of his long-term collection of those corners of space that prevent us from recognizing any familiar image that we can have of a city. Although Beijing was perhaps one of the most photographed places of these last years, nothing in those pictures have those qualities we became accustomed to identify as the symbol of China's transformation as shown in so many photographs. To fully appreciate the images from Simple Present - Beijing, one needs to go back to all those photographs that gave us vast views of an ever-changing landscape, skyscrapers eroding the old buildings, cranes invading the sky and then look again at the claustrophobic small views of empty sidewalks, abandoned blocks of concrete, lowered shop's shutters of Danckaert's photographs.Only a few images give a glimpse of construction sites in the background, but they still seem like meaningless monuments, left there forever.

An Atget of globalization? Could be so, but that would mean a lot of mystery and adventure got lost since our beloved flâneur was walking back and forth along the streets of Paris.And yet, my feeling is that, rather than showing, Danckaert's photographs are hiding us something, so I think there's still hope, I can still search for all those things the photographs are not letting me see...

Urban landscape photographer Gabriele Basilico called Scattered City one of his books of wide views of cities around the world, to express "the complexities of the contemporary city", to show how it is "simultaneously taking and losing shapes": my feeling is that Scattered City would be the perfect name for Bert Danckaert's book, too.

Eva Leitolfwrote me to let me know about her work, which I'm really pleased to mention here. Her projects all seem to deal with the traces (or the wounds) of the past that affect (or are hidden inside) our present time, whether she deals with racist episodes in contemporary Germany, the landscape of Beirut after the war in the 90's or the legacy of German colonialism in Namibia.

What is it that keeps me looking at the strict style of Carlo Corradi's images? Empty street billboards lost in the night, a view of the sea with the signs left (?) by someone swimming inside it. Maybe it's the feeling of the sunset reflecting in those geometric billboards, maybe it's the fascinating idea of leaving a trace on the sea, who knows. We'll maybe find out more tomorrow, when a collective virtual show hosting both him and myself (together with a really great company, you'll see) will open. For now, I'll keep wondering about his images (and their mysterious names, like "Introspection exception, Studio #7").

Of the many interesting photographers mentioned by Heading East (pay regular visit to this great blog, one of my favourite), I have to pick up one at least: Pablo Cabado, especially his 37˚57’35”S 57˚34’47”W project, topographic photography mixed with matters of the heart (if you get what I mean).

Night seems to be the natural element for Ambroise Tézenas - as he proved with his beautiful work on the disappearing (disappeared?) old Beijing, demolished in the past years for the town's renovation towards last summer's Olympic games.

Ian Teh, Dark Clouds.

I discovered Tézenas' work on Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery's website, a photographic gallery located in Beijing's Dashanzi 798 Art District. The gallery's statement says their main desire is "to create a bridge between the east and the west and to initiate a free flowing dialogue between photographers with different views and cultural experience", and this is one of those cases where it is actually the truth: the artists list is impressive, it is definetely rare to see such a group of high-quality works, both having strong resonances and quite distinct personalities, a place where you can really see fine art photography expressing great images that can also tell you something about the world you live in.

Structural memoryis the name of Brian McKee's series of layered images of buildings and constructions made in Lebanon in 2006. By overlapping different images of the same place, Mckee creates the visual history of it: the image becomes the place where the conflict between past and present is consumed, and maybe the way to wonder how a place could have been, or how it was forced to become something else.There are several examples of time-based or 'layered' photography (thousands of snapshots merged together, all the pages of a book in one image and so on), I just want to make two more examples applied to urban landscape:- Michael Wesely, perhaps the master of this kind of photography, with his incredible views shot with years (yes, years) of exposure time (read a previous entry of mine about time in photography here - Italian only, sorry).- Michael Najjar's Netropolis, where he displays a similar visual approach, but digitally composing different images.

Another great example of Japanese night photography by Nobuhiro Fukui. I wonder if there's actually something we can call like that, since his style resonates with other Japanese works I saw: see for example the already mentioned Tomoyuki Sakaguchi or the night shots from the visual bombing of Son of a Bit by Uchihara Yasuhiko. What's the link between these images? The mass of layers creating the density of the different urban landscapes? The HDR? Matter of fact, they share a peculiar quality of darkness, where you can always see inside it, some kind of brighter-than-life vision. Or is it the LCD screen?Sometimes I feel like I can't tell anymore if an image is cheap digital or 8x10... Again, need to look at more real photography, on good old paper...

I found out about Fukui's work thanks to a nice collective photographic project that will be unveiled in something more than a week, so I won't spoil the surprise (but if you know where to look, you'll already find something about it). The project also involves the full original Hippolyte Bayard team, next to much brighter stars of the photographic world, so stay tuned for updates!

I've updated the links on the right side of the page, adding a section for the online photographic magazines. Some of the links were previously mixed with the others, and they're now listed separately with many new entries just added (I have to thank the Conscientious archives for most part of this list).Online magazines are growing in number, they're more and more a true resource for contemporary photography, also given the fact that printed magazines have less and less market (frightening the comparison of the amount of photography I just see online with what I actually see on paper or on a wall - 10 to 1, or maybe worse, damn virtual life...).

Rather than a document, a photograph is a representation, rather than a proof, any photographic image stands as a point of view: this is what maybe Rip Hopkins wants to tell us with his work Romanian Rip, where he stages group portraits of people from Timisoara, the town where the Romanian revolution of 1989 ended Ceausescu's regime. In every picture he poses together with those people, dressed as one of them, holding an orange shutter release that clearly states the fabricated nature of the image. Rip La France is the French sequel of this approach, with Rip mixing with all kinds of French citizens. Apart from aesthetical interpretations, quite a laugh and quite a strong visual statement.

A friend e-mailed me about two Korean photographers (both women), currently living in the U.S. Their works are quite distant one from the other, but my feeling is that they share a common goal to investigate the spaces inhabited by human beings and how we can fit in those spaces, sometimes to the point of disappearing inside them:

- Suyeon Yun's work Homecoming is a wonderful sequence of urban landscape, interiors and environmental portraiture about the life of US soldiers back from Iraq (at least that's what I caught, since there's no text introducing the images).

- Jeong Mee Yoon's work The Pink & Blue Project is made of staged portraits of babies surrounded by all their objects of the same color, a work about "the trends in cultural preferences and the differences in the tastes of children (and their parents) from diverse cultures, ethnic groups as well as gender socialization and identity. The work also raises other issues, such as the relationship between gender and consumerism, urbanization, the globalization of consumerism and the new capitalism", to use her own words.